


learning to speak

by ignitesthestars



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Romance, Touching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 20:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8815582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: They have a language all their own. It only sometimes involves words.





	

They have a language all their own.

It's not a physical thing. That part of their relationship moves at its own pace, pushed forward and restrained by their desires. Inej watches Jesper and Wylam communicate with a few touches to the wrist, a kiss on the cheek, and feels no jealousy.

They have a language all their own.

It's looks, sometimes. More than scheming face, or maybe less. She can't describe any discernible expression on his face or hers, just that the flicker of an eye at the right moment means _this one dies_ , means _you're a fool Kaz Brekker_ , means _only when it comes to you._

Nina rolls her eyes at the both of them in public, and asks her if she doesn't want more in private. It’s winter, and Ketterdam turns the snow black at the edges before it all melts away into a grey slurry. Nina spends too much time staring out the windows.

“Probably once,” Inej admits, coming to stand next to her friend. “But that was another time, and another Inej. I don’t consider this less.”

Nina’s fingers curl on the windowsill, and she murmurs to the icy breeze. “I suppose I can understand that.” And then she turns and is all smiles and waffle demands again. Inej takes her hand anyway, because Kaz isn’t the only one she shares a language with.

She thinks about it later, perched on the roof of the Slat. The wind whips at her scarf, fingers of cold seeking every opening in her coat. She pulls it tighter around her, staring out at the city she has started to consider hers. A wretched place, but Inej knows something of wretched people. She doesn’t love it, exactly, but she will protect it.

The familiar creak of his gait alerts her to his presence long before he speaks, three points of contact on the roof instead of two. She closes her eyes and just listens for a moment, the faint hiss of his breath fighting the wind to reach her.

“If you freeze to death, finding the budget to replace you is going to be hell.”

_Are you all right?_

Inej snorts, glancing over her shoulder at Kaz. He leans heavily on his cane, not entirely trusting his footing between the tiles and the cold.

“You’d figure something out,” she says, although she’s not so sure that he would anymore. There’s a terror and exhilaration in that thought, and for a moment she sees it reflected in the dark pool of his gaze. The truth is that Kaz would lay this city to waste for her. 

The truth is that she can’t be sure what she would do in kind. Her moral compass isn’t that of the Inej who would have considered this _less_. The Inej who considers this everything leaps lightly from her perch and makes her way to him.

 _Glad to see you_. There’s a hesitation in the way she reaches to brush his cheek, but none in the urge. He pauses for a moment, before pressing his lips to the palm of her hand.

Inej thinks of her friends and her parents, of flowers and waffles and ice. She leaves him in the city they are making theirs to take the sea as well. She is a hungry thing, a too-much girl. The Wraith and not, all at the same time. Her names multiply with every slaver ship she devours, and somewhere in Ketterdam he is collecting every one of them.

She leaves him in that city, but she returns to him there as well. They have a language all their own, and her ship on the horizon is _I love you_ a thousand times over.

A shadow stands at the docks, bare hands clenched around a crow’s head cane. Kaz Brekker waits for her return with a thousand _I love you_ s and more.


End file.
